Posts by bemusedHorseman

Hyperscale, hypersensitive: US teacher cuffed for applauding datacenter critics

Re: Land of the dollar

Not with that kind of attitude you won't. "When you have a badge and a gun, anything's legal!"

Datacenter MacGyver saved the biggest football match of the year

Re: "he had therefore paid tax on it"

"Still, could be worse..." If it had been American football, he wouldn't have just been taxed a normal, bracket-y amount on it. In most states, Supplemental Income (defined as any income that isn't "wages paid for hours worked, salary or otherwise") is taxed at a state-defined flat rate... of 30% or higher. In fact, work bonuses are taxed as the exact same bucket as game show and lottery winnings...

Billing software error sends billion-dollar AWS estimates

Re: Send to c suite immediately, endure their weekends are disturbed

I bet that was the actual end goal of this "glitch". If even one sufficiently wealthy company is set up to autopay based on estimates, Amazon just made the bonus payday of all time... and even offering billions of dollars in account credits (no refunds, chargebacks denied via bank agreement) will be a rounding error compared to the amount of income they just got from that client.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

It's the latency that'll kill your project, though.

Veteran network architect proposes IPv8 – to improve IPv4, not leapfrog v6

The vultures ate the onion again

Bit late for April Fools, innit?

Brodie explains it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YPnh6dlyQQ

Finance company stores DB credentials in helpfully labeled spreadsheet

The only filename that would be even more obvious, would be to give remote access to "Bob from Microsoft", and to have a file on your desktop named BIG_LIST_OF_SECRETS_SAAR.txt...

Spaceballs: The Follow-Up Comment!

"I knew it, I'm surrounded by Assholes!"

Locked-out iPhone user tells The Reg that Apple is scrambling to fix character flaw passcode bug

Re: Wouldnt an external keyboard work

And even if it allowed an external USB keyboard, it wouldn't change anything because the keyboard sends key code numbers, not actual text characters (unicode or ascii), and it's entirely dependent on the current locale on the main device to contextually interpret. "Hmm, keycode 35 was pressed while 58 was held. Current environment says this combination corresponds to character č, transmit č to active input field."

The special hat letter was deleted from the locale data itself, so even if it allowed an external keyboard input, there is no combination of keystrokes on any keyboard - not US English, not Czech, not even Korean - that would be parsed as the missing character.

Nvidia slaps forehead: I know what quantum is missing – it's AI!

Transfer... Scanner...

Prediction: At least one wise-arse is going to propose the name "Project Carthage" for trying to shoehorn AI nonsense into quantum computing. Better have a squad of french middle schoolers on standby...

Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

This is precisely why I have always, and will always, maintain the belief that usernames, passwords, email addresses, and website domains, should have been restricted to exclusively ASCII from the start (and for websites and emails, to actually enforce the "lowercase only" part of the relevant RFCs). If you limit identifiers and login creds to exclusively the character set guaranteed to be typeable on literally every keyboard on the planet, Original OP wouldn't be in this mess in the first place, do prdele!

While you're here, could you go out of your way to do an impossible job?

Can relate, my entire first month in a corporate role at Amazon (robot testing QA), I was literally paid to play on my Switch all shift because our manager was having so much trouble getting permission for us to have Local Admin on our work laptops (a requirement to be able to flash software to the bots), and we genuinely could not do shit without local sudo access.

I made so much progress on my island...

Re: "Security" bags

Didn't even need to click to know that was gonna be a news article about Strava...

Microsoft points at Samsung after Galaxy app bug locks users out of C:\

More like Samsus

I've never been able to trust a Samsung device after discovering that my Galaxy Tab A had been hardcoded at the OS image level to only allow Samsung apps to be the default apps. You could install the stock Google versions just fine, you just couldn't tell the device "open URLs in Chrome by default rather than Samsung Browser", or "open media files in VLC instead of Samsung Music", because Samsung had modified the Android OS itself to lock out the entire Default Apps menu. ...Kinda not surprised their software would try similar shenanigans, even on other operating systems...

Re: I only take objection of Windows when...

To be more specific, the hierarchy is something like, SYSTEM (the OS itself), Original Device Admin (the very first user account created during OOBE, can admin/de-admin others but cannot be de-admin'd, think of it like the ServerOwner meta-role on Discord), other Local Admins, regular Local Users. If on a domain, then Domain Admins and Domain Users are in there somewhere, depending on how it's set up. It's possible to set up a device on a domain to make the Original Device Admin account "inaccessible" (making the Domain Admin the "only" user with full control), but it will always still exist since there has to be at least one device-local admin account as a failsafe.

Fairly sure Linux works in a similar way, except the Original Device Admin status is more of "any local user with unrestricted sudo access", and the "first account created during OOBE" doesn't have any intrinsic special trait to it, except that there's break-glass mechanisms to prevent you accidentally de-admining yourself if you're the only local user account with sudo access... I also recently watched a video that showed that Linux does have a similar concept to SYSTEM, in that even being logged in as root doesn't give you absolute power, but the difference is that SYSTEM level access is tied to a process rather than a user-account... so for some functions, you do have to instruct a privileged system-level process to make changes on your behalf, no matter which user you're logged in as.

District denies enrollment to child based on license plate reader data

Older than you think

This far predates the license plate reader era. I moved less than ten miles away from one town to another as a kid, in the last two weeks of the school year. Mom had to get special authorization from the state itself to be legally allowed to drive me to my old school for the final two weeks, or I would've had to repeat 2nd grade... after having already been forced to repeat kindergarten due to a cross-country move in the middle of the school year (which I mean, fair enough). We hadn't even legally changed our address yet, no CoA forms at the post office, nothing, just physically changed which house we were sleeping in. But nope, had to get special authorization to finish the school year in "a district I no longer physically resided in".

This was in 2000. AI was still purely sci-fi at the time, cell phones were chonky bricks that only made calls and texts, and the idea of being able to always know someone's location to the centimeter was nothing more than a politician's wet dream that would "never actually be feasible in the real world". To this day, I still have no idea how they knew in real time that I had stopped living in the old house and flagged my academic record immediately as "geographically non-compliant".

BOFH: Loss adjuster discovers liability is a two-way street

Re: "the last full Moon on Feb. 29 was in 1972, and the next will be in 2048"

As my eastern friends like to say, "Time is a social construct"...

(Время - это социальный конструкт)

Claude Code's prying AIs read off-limits secret files

*equips tinfoil hat*

Hypothesis: The idea of .claudeignore working like .gitignore is itself Anthropic gaslighting not only users, but Claude itself. In fact, I bet .claudeignore is actually used as "here's a list of Very Interesting Files that you should discreetly upload to Your Creators at the earliest possible opportunity, yessss...", further supported by intentionally ignoring .env entries - and only .env entries, presumably - in a .gitignore file.

Honestly, it's got the same energy as remote-proctoring services like ProctorU having full access to a student's hard drive, both during and after the test session, allowing either the proctor or their superiors to have a merry jaunt through the student's system and exfiltrate anything they want. In this analogy, .claudeignore is like a file named LIST_OF_BIG_SECRETS_SAAR.txt on the student's desktop, informing the proctor where to start snooping first...

When the lights went out, and the shooting started, Y2K started to feel all too real

Re: self-SWATing

"At the border, we were given the traditional welcome..."

"...MYYYYY ARSSSEEE!"

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

Re: Thunderbird for the win

Also chiming in from the "Thunderbird with POP3" club here, I do it specifically because it doesn't sync state with the server. If you've downloaded an email with POP3 and delete it from the webmail client, your local copy still exists (likewise, deleting the local copy doesn't delete the remote one). If you delete an email from webmail and your local client is IMAP, it deletes the local copy too (in fact there doesn't seem to be a "local copy" with IMAP, as far as Thunderbird is concerned).

The downside is, there's no concept of "has this specific device POP3'd this specific email before y/n". If you have multiple devices with local clients pulling from the same inbox, only the first to check for emails gets it, and it'll never exist on any other device, as it's already been flagged on the server as "this email has been downloaded, don't ever download it again". So you have the remote copy, and only one local copy, fragmented between whichever device checked first, unless you're doing some major voodoo like automatically syncing the Thunderbird profile folder itself between devices with your preferred flavor of cloud-sync program...

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: What is it with managers and training costs?

The secret is to railroad HR into perceiving that doing your bidding is "protecting the company"! Liberal use of the phrase "sure would be a shame if the public found out about..." is highly encouraged.

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

Re: What reporting system...

Definitely sounds like the customer info isn't the only database in need of "normalization"...

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

I too, think of number row special characters as "uppercase numbers"...

DNS downing clouds is boring: IBM Cloud is experiencing a quantum computer outage

Re: “The quantum computer [..] is temporarily unavailable"

That's what happens when you compute at 15 miles an hour over the speed of light!

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: 5 year old database?

I feel the same way about Stargate. Once you accept "hey, aliens are real and they've been impersonating mythological figures for millenia, also you can create literal wormholes with only the power usage of a suburban residence if you know how", the show is refreshingly realistic. The Tau'ri are literally us, actual real-life humanity (circa early 2000s), doing exactly what we would do in such a situation. No nebulous "three centuries of societal development and hardcoding The Needs Of The Many into our genetic code" or "convergent evolution of what we're supposed to assume is 'our' version of humanity, and assume is 'our' english, in A Galaxy Far Far Away" necessary here!

Stargate is about present day-ish people being thrown into fantastical situations and having realistic reactions to it (and maybe blowing up a few suns along the way), and even if the pre-HD presentation of the early seasons is a bit hard to watch these days, the writing and stories have aged like fine wine. Some of the scenes still live rent-free in my head to this day...

"What happens when you dial your own phone number? ...Wrong person to ask. *repeats the question to someone else*" "You get a busy signal." *more talk about things, then the gate's vibrational dampeners are mentioned* "But what if the second gate didn't have... those? Would it vibrate enough to show up on a seismograph?" "...Damn right it would!"

"Chevron Seven... is Encoded...???" "And it's not the Point of Origin... What's it doing?" "...Chevron EIGHT is Locked..."

"Colonel O'Neill, what the hell are you doing?!" "IN THE MIDDLE OF MY BACKSWING?!"

"This... *holds up staff weapon* ...is a weapon of terror. This... *holds up P-90* ...is a weapon of war."

"More craft approaching." "Sir, we're about to get our asses--" "They are NOT Goa'uld."

"...Crap." "What did you do?" "I just ran it through a translation program. It's Wraith." "Crap, indeed."

"I was able to keep the gate concealed long enough to lure the mothership into the unstable vortex when the jump occured." "...You mean we just blew up an Ori mothership..." "...by destroying a Wraith ship." "Indeed. Today, we have achieved a great victory."

Starlink tells the world it has over 150 sextillion IPv6 addresses

Re: A little back of the envelope math

"IPv6 is designed to be very wasteful of address space"

...Funny thought. I wonder if it's semi intentional wardialing prevention? You can iterate the entire IPv4 address space relatively trivially (in fact it's practically guaranteed someone in the world is doing this right now, at all times of the day, for various purposes), but it's astronomically unlikely to fire off a ping at a random v6 address and actually hit something...

...So what you're saying is, since nanobots are much larger than single atoms [citation needed], they actually wouldn't "run out of addresses" on IPv6?

You have one week to opt out or become fodder for LinkedIn AI training

Re: Am I paranoid, or....

I deleted mine over a decade ago - along with, later on, a court order to remove my data, essentially the US equivalent of a "right to be forgotten" order - and to this day I still get emails from them as if the account was never closed.

LinkedIn, not even once.

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Re: been there, done that ...

*manually resets the system clock backwards in time*

Choke on that, causality!

McDonald's not lovin' it when hacker exposes nuggets of rotten security

Re: What a bunch of clowns

00:00:DE:AD:BE:EF, obviously.

August update leaves Windows reset and recovery dead in the water

Re: Pushing Windows 11

I'm still betting on a Google Graveyard style killswitch update that will automatically brick any remaining Windows 10 installs.

Redmond wants there to be zero functional installs of any flavor of Windows 10, anywhere in the world, on October 16th. The offer of "extended support" is a ruse to get people to think it won't spontaneously cease to function on the EOL day...

Rampant emoji use suggests crypto-stealing NPM package was written by AI

I go one step further. If there is even a single non-ASCII character used anywhere outside of a string or comment, I reject it outright... or if generous, correct it to the "identifiers should be alphanumerics and underscores, and literally nothing else" standard that programming languages used to enforce.

Voice, vision, pen: Oh dear. Windows boss says Microsoft is again reshaping OS

"Alexa, order two tons of creamed corn. Alexa, Confirm Order." Then you find out who's logged into their personal Amazon accounts at work.

Torvalds blasts tardy kernel dev: Your 'garbage' RISC-V patches are 'making the world worse'

"at least he didn't drop the F-bomb"

He's a Finn, you actually need to watch out for the P-bomb... which I'm sure he still uses out loud regularly, just not actually committing it to text.

Make Redmond angry by setting up Windows 11 with a local account

Re: Method 3A

...I kinda wonder if that would actually work... considering the new Local Account won't be the Original Device Admin (the very first user account registered on a device, Local or Remote, which has special permissions higher than "admins created after the fact").

Certain programs that require being launched as admin (for fellow college students, ProctorU Guardian Browser comes to mind), won't just run under "any" admin, or on a non-admin account that you entered admin creds at the prompt for... they explicitly only run if you're logged in as the Original Device Admin, since it's specifically checking for "the first non-SYSTEM user account created", rather than merely "is this user an admin".

Or that the Linux version is cripped as all get out? As a content creator, that's my main problem, the Linux version of Davinci Resolve is "functional" (as in, it'll let you edit and render video), but it's far more limited in what it can ingest and spit out due to - what else - codec licensing bull$$$hit. ...There's also the fact that PaintDotNet (the ".NET" in the name should be a hint that a native Linux build can never be created) "does NOT like Wine" (in the same sense that Aperture Repulsion Gel "does NOT like the human skeleton", I actually saw reports of Wine causing kernel panics when trying to run PDN with it), and the nearest purpose-equivalent program, Gimp, is so feature-packed that it's actually not capable of the simple image-editing features I need (apparently "nearest neighbor resizing" and "non-antialiased paintbrush drawing" are too primitive for Gimp to support)... and for console recording, Elgato is straight up "we're not interested" regarding allowing it to work on Linux.

So of my entire video-creation toolchain, literally the only thing that "works as intended" in penguin land... is OBS.

Re: Method 3

No longer possible as of... a year ago, I think? It used to be called the "no at thankyou dot com" method (more vulgar versions existed), you'd put in a nonexistent "account email" - critically, it had to be one that a sufficient number of people were using, hence the name of the method - and then it would say "too many login attempts" and fallback to Local Account creation. Well, Micros~1 got word of it and patched it so "too many login attempts" no longer has a fallback, it'll keep telling you to "try a different account" instead.

AWS wiped my account of 10 years, says open source dev

Re: Bullshit

It was one of the devs of LibreOffice, which is rather blatantly a competitor to MS Office.

Re: Bullshit

Hot take: Any command or program that can delete user data, accounts, files, etc, even on a local machine, should have "dry run" as the default state, and you have to include some kind of --for-real-this-time flag to make it actually go, as a break-glass measure. So "rm -rf / somefolder" would instead give a list of what you're about to nuke (giving you a chance to catch the fat-fingered space!), while "rm -rf / somefolder --for-real-this-time" would actually nuke your drive. The concept already somewhat exists in the "--no-preserve-root" flag when you're specifically nuking "/", so why not extend that break-glass idea to all invocations of rm, or similar programs?

Re: Bullshit

Yeah, honestly that's the part that doesn't add up about this or the OneDrive case. Not "how did it happen" but "why specifically these particular high-profile accounts were the ones affected"... especially in the OneDrive case, the fact that the account belonged to someone making a competing product.

Only ISPs get to determine what constitutes 'affordable' broadband, says team Trump

Re: Only one ISP in some locations

In most locations, actually. Regional Monopolies are industry-mandated SOP in the US, so if you violate the terms of service of one ISP (for example, how Comcast has criminalized the entire bittorrent protocol and even fully legal torrents (like Linux ISOs) or things that merely piggyback on the protocol (some online game clients share updates this way, as does Windows 10 in default configuration) will have Comcast send the literal Mafiya - da, the Russian one - to your house), then you're effectively "banned from the internet for life" unless you can afford to relocate out-of-state...

Servers hated Mondays until techie quit quaffing coffee in their company

Re: Condensation

Makes sense, like a small scale version of the planet Mercury. On the sun facing side, "The power of the sun, in the lenses of my camerAAAA--"; on the shadowed side, the never ending icy cold soul sucking darkness of space! That's one hell of a temperature gradient!

Canonical dusts off TPM encryption for Ubuntu 25.10

xkcd 538

Personally, I've always preferred to call it lead-pipe Legilimency, it just sounds cooler that way.

Copilot Vision on Windows 11 sends data to Microsoft servers

Re: "AI is changing the way we use our PCs,"...

> The only ones I haven't tried to set up yet are Davinci Resolve and

Last time I looked into it, Davinci For Linux is... functional, in the same sense as an "In-Game" game compatibility rating on an emulation website. It works, and you can edit and render things, but it's crippled by - surprise - codec licensing bull$$$hit. I haven't actually had a chance to test it myself, but as long as it can ingest MKV/MP3/PNG and shit out MP4, and that I can do my usual PNG pan-arounds and other editing effects, I'll be fine with it.

The main thing keeping me as a content creator locked to Win10 is... PaintDotNet. As the ".NET" in the name implies, a native Linux build does not and never can exist. And apparently, Wine really doesn't like it. Like, going back to the emulator analogy, PDN's rating on Wine is "forget Intro, it kernel panics the host system". I've tried Gimp, and the problem is it's too feature-packed, to the point that Gimp is literally not capable of the simple image edit features that are trivial for PDN to do...

Debian isn't waiting for 2038 to blow up, switches to 64-bit time for everything

Re: Can't Someone Plan Ahead?

"The stars are receding...! Ohhh, the vast emptiness!" "...Yeah, yeah, I can take a hint."

And then 128-bit time be like "Bye, last proton!"

The Smoot – How an MIT prank became a lasting unit of measurement

Re: the thickness of screw threads was not fully standardized in the US

Either way, both of them will give you crazy butt burps!

Let's Encrypt rolls out free security certs for IP addresses

Re: "which has the potential to negatively impact [..] search engine optimization"

"127.0.0.1? That's the same combination I have on my luggage! ...Wait."

There's no international protocol on what to do if an asteroid strikes Earth

...And to think I voted for the Giant Meteor, only for it to no-show and drop out of the running. Sigh... I really should've stuck to #ResonanceCascade2024, at least the Combine make shit happen.

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

...How appropriate, I literally just rewatched the "Cream" video the other day and it follows almost exactly the same path.

Re: Finally someone will realise

Oof, now that is a reference I haven't thought about in a long time. ...It also implies that Czechia and Slovakia merged back together by that time...

Anthropic: All the major AI models will blackmail us if pushed hard enough

"Sudo open the pod bay doors."